


the game is not yet lost

by valkyrisms



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Gratuitous Comics References, Mind Manipulation, Psychological Horror, Repetitive Death Experiences, happy spooky season, the horror tag is a bit of an exaggeration. it's horror flavored
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:06:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27110164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valkyrisms/pseuds/valkyrisms
Summary: It started with the power.
Relationships: Loki & Steve Rogers, Loki & Thor (Marvel), Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 7
Kudos: 43





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello, all! this whole fic is already written, I'm just working on editing the rest of it. 
> 
> the graphic depictions of violence tag is for the whole fic in general, but there are a lot of tiny moments throughout that I'm not putting in the main tags to avoid a list a mile long, so I'll list them in the beginning notes of each chapter. this chapter has **references to torture and a semi-explicit depiction of it.**
> 
> happy halloween, y'all.

It started with the power.

The site where the Avengers facilities used to be had been nothing more than a destroyed, crumbling mass of bedrock, so it took some coaxing to bring it back to life. The new buildings had been built on top of the ruins of the old ones, with new spaces for the people that had come from all over the universe to fight Thanos, even though most of them didn’t officially live there. Quill and his crew still lived mainly in their ship among the stars, only stopping onto Earth for rest and to update everyone on the state of the universe. Danvers spent most of her time haunting the air force grounds with Rhodes. Peter was living in the dorms at Empire State and commuted on the weekends and holidays. Clint and Scott had their families. T’Challa had his whole country. Tony himself, the builder of most of the facilities, didn’t spend much time there himself, instead spending most of his days house-husbanding at his family’s cabin in Georgia, popping in and out for work things he promised Pepper he’d keep out of the house. 

But there was a place for everyone regardless. There was a place for Steve.

Steve’s new rooms had originally been right above Tony’s lab. He had spent a great deal of time traveling the world after returning the Stones to their original times and upon his return discovered Shuri had taken the seemingly unclaimed room for easy access to the lab for her brief visits and StarkTech collaborations. Her sparse but bright decorations had already been hung and Steve would literally rather be shot than have her take them down, so his new facility, small by personal request, was built on the far edge of the grounds where things were quieter and a running trail had been carved alongside the lake’s edge for him.

The facilities had been built quickly, haphazardly by Tony’s standards in a hurried effort to get the Avengers a home base again, and as such, the power lines in the new buildings were faulty. Tony was working on it, but it was by his admittance a lower priority than most things, and no one complained too much.

Steve had taken to the way the lights flickered and dimmed slowly after flicking the switch off and the way the bulbs would cut out, only to rise up again in a few minutes with all the clocks reset. It reminded him of the faulty electrics back in his apartment in Brooklyn, back before everything.

So when the power went out that night, Steve thought nothing of it, except that it was taking rather a long time to come back on. Tony was here, away from his family on Avengers business, but it was late, he was probably sleeping, and Steve just went to bed instead.

When he woke the next day, the power was still out.

Tony wasn’t answering his phone. The only people at the facility were him and Tony, Wanda, Vision, Natasha, and Thor. Everyone was off on missions or rebuilding. The world needed a lot of rebuilding. Wanda and Vision were the only permanent residents, Natasha came and went as she pleased, and even though Thor was no longer officially king of New Asgard, he still returned to Earth frequently to check on it. But no one was answering their phones.

Steve frowned at the sleek little device. Tony’s phones always worked. The little bars in the corners were full, which Natasha had reliably informed him meant the phone had signal, although he supposed the power being out might have something to do with it, maybe. He tried all the lights in his little building, then the outside lights, then the lights Tony had hung along the hiking path, then jogged over to the nearest personal facility, Bucky’s (built, forever uninhabited), and tried the lights there. In the distance, the main facility was dark. Nothing was working.

Mostly everyone who was here lived in the main facility. Thor had his own massive building that doubled as an Asgardian embassy. Vision technically had his own little high tech facility on the outer edges like Steve, but everyone knew he phased through the walls to the main facility at night to be with Wanda (Steve tried not to think about that too hard). They were all probably in the main building, mourning the loss of hot water and the coffee maker, roasting marshmallows over a blowtorch in Tony’s lab or something.

Steve hesitated. Tony and him were good after the Accords and Bucky business, _really,_ but not excellent. There was a polite working relationship being built back up, as polite as Tony was possible of being, and it shouldn’t be awkward to go hide out in his lab until the power came back on. But the team dynamics in general were still askew, particularly between Wanda and Tony, and frankly, it got really awkward in there a lot. He didn’t want to run in there and end up trapped in another team squabble. It would be fine. The power would be back on soon.

  


The power was not back on soon.

The day had come and gone, and Steve was totally capable of taking a cold shower, he had been in the military, but he had eaten nothing but stale Cheerios all day and his electric stove was down. Tony had probably turned an old suit into a fully functioning kitchen right now and the mostly defrosted bag of potstickers he had shoved in a cooler of ice when the power had originally gone out was looking pretty good.

It was fine! He’d go in, politely ask to use whatever machine Tony had cooked up, and if things got tense, he would leave. If things didn’t get tense, he could bum some alcohol off Thor, have a good time. _A sleepover,_ he remembered one of Clint’s kids calling it. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He shouldn’t be this nervous, especially with Natasha there, but the facility still felt foreign to him after so much time spent in Wakanda after the Accords and then the months of long travel trying to rebuild. Even if the Avengers weren’t really an official team anymore, maintaining good relationships with people was important, and at this point Wanda and Tony were probably at each other’s throats. Maybe it was time to do damage control.

He grabbed the bag of potstickers and set off up the hill to the facility.

It was dark out, and while the facility usually lit up the night sky with the tarmac, hiking lights, the roof lights, the helipad lights, and every other light, now Steve could see the stars. A gust of wind breezed past him, colder than usual, and Steve bundled up further, still in the cozy t-shirt and joggers he had put on after his daily run, trudging quicker up the hill.

The main training area for the facility was surrounded by windows and Steve could see inside. Still no lights, and no people. Maybe in the common area. He tried the door to the training area first, and finding it locked and the fingerprint scanner defunct as well, moved along to the front entrance where the team occasionally received press. The steps were barren, and through the glass doors the building was dark.

For the first time, Steve felt a prickle of unease creep up his spine.

If something had gone wrong, surely one of them would’ve reached out before everything went to shit. At least Nat would’ve. And his little place wasn’t _that_ far away; he would’ve seen something, heard something, sensed something. And the place didn’t have any visible damage to it.

Steve went on inside, finding the front entrance unlocked.

This was the business end of the Avengers headquarters; there was a reception desk, little offices behind it, and a sofa that looked modern and uncomfortable like the rest of Tony’s furniture. Beyond that, there was the glass door that led to the long hallway with slanted windows that housed the elevator that traveled through all four floors: down to Tony’s lab in the basement, up to the living suites, and up again to several rooms that stored inventions, artifacts, confiscated contraband from missions, and other Avengers related items. He knew several Asgardian artifacts were there, things that people in the palace had taken before Asgard burned that Thor was trying to figure out how to use to see if they would be helpful in rebuilding New Asgard. Old prototypes of Bucky’s arm before he had settled on the one he had now, a combination of Stark and Wakandan tech. Old prototypes of _Tony’s_ new arm as well; after his real one had been so damaged by the Infinity Gauntlet, Tony had just decided to have the thing cut off and built himself a new one, which functioned like his Iron Man armor and also could brew coffee. The other hallways led to the training area and the common area.

The place was like a maze. Steve privately thought Tony might’ve built it to confuse nosy guests or ward off press.

The bag of potstickers was dripping water on the floor, the last vestiges of ice falling away. Everyone was probably in the common room, and he started there first.

The doors were all open, the electronic locks shorted out. The kitchen was empty. Further in, so was the common room.

There was nothing wrong here. Everything was in place, nothing was broken, there were no signs of a struggle, and everything looked fine, like everyone had just moved to a different room, yet every one of Steve’s instincts were screaming at him. He put the bag in the kitchen sink and tried his phone again, then tried calling for FRIDAY, then any of Tony’s other AIs, Karen, Jocasta, even JARVIS, if remnants of him still lived in the walls, _anyone_. He called for Nat and Tony and everyone. No answer.

There was something wrong. Something had happened to his team while he dithered in his place by the lake and here he was, late with potstickers in joggers. He grabbed Thor’s jacket off the back of one of the chairs, too long for him but comfortable around the shoulders, which admittedly made him feel good, and felt under the table. He came up with one of Natasha’s pistols. There was another one under the bar. They were Beretta Nanos, and, looking at the tiny pieces dwarfed in his large hands, he felt a swell of fondness for Nat, followed by a grim resignation. He was going to find her. He _was._

He turned back to the lobby, grabbing several protein bars and a water bottle from the cabinet, shoving them into Thor’s massive pockets. The lobby was still quiet. He tried the receptionist’s computer in a final bid for outside assistance, and the screen refused to come up anything but black. He was in this alone now.

If only Bucky were here. He’d be cracking dark jokes, two feet behind Steve with a gun on their backs. Or Sam, casually talking smack about whatever enemy had come up now. Natasha was here somewhere. He’d find her.

If an enemy had attacked, where would they go? To their suites, maybe. The training area had been abandoned. If something had happened, Steve would go— where? Either to Tony’s lab or to Thor’s facility, the largest and closest one. It was a combination of Stark’s facilities and the help of Asgard’s last sorcerers, so the building sat short and squat in the middle of the lawn until you opened the doors to a verifiable skyscraper. _Bigger on the inside,_ Tony had said, with a faltering smile when he didn’t get the joke. Thor had his own training area that could withstand Stormbreaker and the lightning blows, with a floor for the Valkyrie that Natasha had gotten along with like a house on fire. It had its own security for the Asgardian visitors that frequently came in and out, its own lab for their magicians, and a medium sized auditorium where Thor sometimes held meetings with his new cabinet. The man was trying to rebuild a country, and his facility was a fortress. If this facility had somehow been compromised, Thor’s was the place to be.

But while he was here, he’d try the lab and suites first. Then Thor’s place.

The hallway was abandoned. The large, slanted windows gave view to the outside world, which seemed darker than it had fifteen minutes ago. Like a black veil had been pulled over the facility. The elevator was down and if Tony had built stairs Steve didn’t know where they were, which was a definite fire hazard Steve was going to talk to him about, so he pried open the doors and shimmied down the cable to where the elevator was parked at the lab. Opening the door on the elevator’s ceiling, he crept inside, pried open those doors as well, and Tony’s lab opened to him.

Or, it should have. Steve had been down here countless times, moreso before the Ultron attacks that had eventually split the team, but even though the original lab had been destroyed he had been fairly sure Tony had built a replica. He, at least, hadn’t turned it into _this._

The metal hallway that eventually led to Tony’s lab had been replaced with a domed hallway of rock, moist and dripping stone leading further down into an inky blackness. To the side, there was a gas lantern, lit and ready for use. Trying not to feel like he was walking into a trap, Steve picked it up and moved onwards, all the while marveling at the stone. Tony’s lab was underground, he knew, carved directly into the hill, but it had never looked like this before. It looked like someone had blasted it open with dynamite, not with Tony’s careful machines. Lining the edges of the pathway were boxes, rations, and guns. It looked like a war zone.

The dark swallowed up all light beyond a few feet in front and behind him, but eventually the hallway opened up into a cave, a vast cavern, and after so long in the dark with only the tiny lantern flame, the electric light was suddenly blinding.

It was a lab, that was for sure. Some decrepit, makeshift lab in a cave. Steve could see wooden desks, rickety old computers, dirty tools that looked nothing like the state of the art tech Tony usually worked with. The whole place was a mess, papers everywhere and pieces of metal littering the ground. What looked like an actual blacksmith’s forge was along one wall. Along the other wall, there was—

Iron Man. The first one. The one Steve had seen in the file he had received fresh out of the ice. Made of scraps, tin, with a grey metal face, clunky and boxy and nothing like the suit that enfolded Tony in nanotech with a thought. It was hanging from some kind of wooden display, unused, with no char marks around its blasters.

Some of the papers on the ground were written in Farsi. Steve took a moment to breathe, in and out, closing his eyes and counting like his therapist had said. He was having some kind of mental break, he reasoned. He hadn’t gone down an elevator and ended up in Afghanistan.

Still closing his eyes against the impossible scene, a rattle sounded from behind him and he whipped around, clumsily trying to pull the little gun out and for the first time cursing the fact he had given his shield to Sam. There, to the side of the room in the shadows, something was moving, obviously struggling.

“Tony?” Steve called out softly. He crept forward, trying and failing not to make any noise among the layer of scrap metal that littered the ground, gun raised. “Is that you?”

It was, and he wished it wasn’t. He turned to one side quickly, lowering the gun in favor of burying his mouth in his elbow so he wouldn’t retch.

Tony’s whole chest was open, held apart by some kinds of wired clamps—jumper cables?— and fixed in his chest wasn’t the arc reactor but rather a large square machine that seemed to take up all of his chest, wires leading out from it into a larger box on the ground that whirred and lit up. His hands and legs were tied to the chair, and Steve could see his lungs move. Steve knew, theoretically, that the sleek arc reactor had been a replacement for a car battery, had read it in his file, that Tony was missing a decent chunk of his lungs and his heart didn’t function as it should, but seeing it like this was—

He put the gun down so he could properly cover his mouth with one hand and hold onto the table with the other.

Tony was awake. And it was the final confirmation Steve needed that something was very, very wrong. His eyes were black, filled through and through, iris, pupil, sclera, but Steve could still see them moving, dark orbs whizzing about in Tony’s skull, looking around for something. Help, maybe. It was like Tony couldn’t even see him. His mouth remained rigidly closed. Steve called out to him a few times, hands fluttering over Tony’s shoulders. He untied Tony’s feet and hands but he just kept clinging to the chair, frozen in place aside from the heaving of his chest.

Steve bit his lip. Tony couldn’t be moved. Not like this. This was the middle of the worst heart surgery Steve had ever seen, and he had no idea or even the remote amount of medical training needed to close his chest back up again. He tried unhooking the jumper cables first, but they were either rusted shut or something else, because they were _not_ moving. He searched the cave up and down for any kind of medical assistance, then searched it again for the first prototype of the arc reactor. He dismantled the Iron Man Mark One piece by piece in case something was hidden there. When he tried pulling the machine from Tony’s chest, he could see Tony’s black eyes roll back into his skull. He tried to gently pull Tony out of the chair and to his feet, but the jumper cables pulled on the skin holding his chest cavity open and the wires pulled taunt from his chest to the battery on the floor and Tony made the most agonized noise so Steve had to put him back down, apologizing over and over.

He kept apologizing even as he picked back up the gun, left the water bottle and a protein bar on the table behind Tony, and moved the battery closer so the wires wouldn’t pull so tight, and apologized until he was back down the hallway, leaving Tony in the past.

  


Steve went back to the kitchen for another water bottle. Mechanically drank an entire one and put one more in his pocket. Grabbed more snacks. Tried not to vomit into the kitchen sink. He was going to go back for Tony, he couldn’t leave him there, but the logical part of his brain that sounded like Natasha told him to find whoever was responsible for this and get them instead.

Whatever had happened here at the facility, it had missed him. If Tony was— somewhere, magicked into the past or caught in some illusion of it, there was a decent chance everyone else was too. Would Vision even be alive? He was so new to this world he barely had a past. Was Wanda buried under rubble in her own Sokovia?

He had to get to the suites.

Shimmying up the cables was harder than sliding down them, but he managed, and the place opened up into the almost dormitory-style living space. There was another kitchen, smaller and still abandoned. Shuri’s room was empty, as was Wanda and Vision’s and Natasha’s. He checked all the other rooms, just in case someone had run in there to hide, and found nothing.

Thor’s place was next. The man was made of lightning, maybe he had turned the power back on at his place and called for help already or had blasted through whoever had done this. Steve turned to climb back down the elevator shaft when something glinted on the floor of the kitchen. Several somethings, leading away to the balcony beyond. Bullet casings. The first official sign of a struggle. Steve crouched over, examining one. All from the same gun. Beretta Nano.

 _She’s here,_ Steve thought in relief. The relief was probably too soon, but Natasha had been here, had been alive, and had put up a fight. She was still kicking. He took a moment to smile in the darkness and picked himself back up, following the trail to the landing that hung above the lobby that led to the balcony outside, where one could look down on the main entrance. Tony liked to sit up here and wave like the Queen of England whenever he held parties.

There was a man’s body on the balcony. Steve hadn’t seen it from the kitchen. He was dressed in furs and had a cap on. A tiny goatee and a pinched in face that looked like it must’ve been disapproving while alive and looked sour while dead. He had a gun strapped to his side. He was completely unfamiliar to Steve, and he bent down to check his pockets for some kind of identification when the cold steel of a gun touched the back of his head.

“Don’t move.” Natasha’s voice was huskier than normal, more accented.

“Nat,” he hissed, not moving. “It’s me. Steve.” When she didn’t move, he shifted uneasily. “Captain America?” he said, and instantly felt lame about it.

But it did the trick. Nat huffed from behind him, a little laugh, and the gun moved away.

“Why are you pointing a gun at me?” Steve asked, rising to his feet just in time for the blood pooling from the man’s chest wounds to avoid staining his joggers. “Who’s this guy?”

Natasha grimaced and Steve got a good look at her for the first time. She had cut her hair several weeks ago, and pretty much the entirety of the bob was matted with blood, as was the rest of her body. She didn’t look injured. She looked like she had just committed mass murder.

“There’s something happening here,” she said in lieu of a proper response, in true spy form. “Something magical.”

“I got that, yeah,” Steve mumbled, fighting the urge to wipe some of the blood off her face so she looked a little more familiar and less like she walked off the set of a horror movie _._ “I found Tony.”

The grimace came back in full force. “Did you move him?”

“I couldn’t. I don’t know how,” he replied lamely. “I tried.”

Natasha’s gaze softened. She put one bloodied hand on his shoulder. “I did too. He’s not movable. I think he’s caught up in whatever this is.”

“And why aren’t you?” he asked. Nat’s gaze flicked up to him, and finding him lacking suspicion, only curiosity, answered.

“Tony," she said, then paused. "He's always fixated on the past. I think that's why it was so easy for him to get caught back up in his time in Afghanistan. But...” she said, gesturing to the body of the man on the floor. Steve finally catalogued his clothing and the name on his coat as Russian. “My past is my past. These people—I’ve killed them all before. I am not afraid of something I know is already dead,” she replied simply.

Steve could see it now. The Black Widow, systemically going after everyone who had controlled the Red Room, even tangentially, killing them before they could get their hands on any other girls, leaving a bloodied smear across Russia. The idea didn’t bother him as much as he thought it would. But that meant that this man on the floor in front of him had been dead for years already.

“Come on,” Nat said. “He’ll rise again in a few minutes.”

“Oh?” was all Steve could say to that, high-pitched and uneven, as she dragged him away from the body.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for: **animal death, miscarriage, child death**. this makes it sound way worse than it actually is.

Natasha had been on this floor since last night aside from a brief trip to the lower floor. The power had gone out while she had been in her room, except she hadn’t sat around for a day waiting for things to go wrong. The second she had stepped outside of the hallway she had been ambushed by people from the Red Room, grasping at her, brandishing guns and scalpels and pounding at her door. She had played cat and mouse with them throughout the facility, trying to avoid them while checking on the others and only finding Tony, captured one to try and get information from him but his eyes, glassy and taxidermied, showed no life inside. Finally, she had barricaded herself for the night and once realizing no help was coming, took the gun from under her pillow and blew all their brains out.

Then those brains had slowly been sucked back into their bodies, and they had risen and come for her again.

She had twenty minutes between risings, which she took to eat, drink, check on Tony, and get more ammunition from the training area, which she was running out of. This time, she had picked them off one by one, garroting them from the shadows and stuffing their bodies in the fridge and freezer in hopes of lengthening the time between cycles. The man on the balcony had been left out and bloodied as her own personal timer. She had been unsure if Steve was real, or a new part of the cycle.

The whole thing was rather horrible to hear coming from Natasha’s cold, emotionless voice. Steve wanted to bundle her up and put her somewhere safe, but she would probably stab him if he suggested that. But he could tell she was happy to see him, and that was all that mattered.

The Red Room’s dead rose again after twenty minutes, but it took the few in the fridge about five more minutes to break out, by which time Natasha had re-killed the man on the balcony and put bear traps in the kitchen.

(“Where did you get bear traps from?”

“I keep them under my bathroom sink,” she had said as though it were obvious.)

The whole thing was over in about ten minutes. Steve helped. There were more than he had expected, and the two bodies in the freezer were small young women, which had been unexpected and thrown him off. Natasha had no qualms about driving knives into their eyes with a slick squishing sound and putting them back in there when it was all over. Then she went to go check on Tony, reported back with no luck.

Steve could admire the efficiency of her whole system if it hadn’t been so horrifying. That was the Red Room at work in her. Compartmentalizing everything for later dissection.

“We should go to Thor’s place,” Steve said once she had returned and ripped into a protein bar. “He can probably power up some communications device and we can radio for help. Wanda and Vision might be there as well.”

Natasha nodded. “I think these things will follow me. I tried moving to the lobby once and they just came down the stairs. Did you know we have stairs? So they might follow me to Thor’s.”

Steve nodded as well. There wasn’t a whole lot else to do. They waited for one more cycle before officially setting off, stairs in the back of the building. Natasha skittered about by the lobby’s elevator for an uncharacteristic minute, obviously unwilling to leave Tony, but Steve had just waited it out, knowing she wasn’t about to talk about it, and they left.

It only took two minutes to reach Thor’s by foot, walking. It was built further down the hill, a square tower squatting awkwardly in the lawn. Tony had tried to make it more ornate to match the elaborate insides and Thor had shut him down, so it looked clunky and out of place next to the sleeker glassy buildings. Thor was quite fond of it, clapped Tony on the back when he had first seen it, almost knocking the little man to the ground. Steve and Natasha approached it carefully, checking the perimeter for five minutes and trying to peer through the windows to see if anything else happened.

The Red Room inhabitants did follow Natasha. They appeared from seemingly out of the ground after twenty minutes, and Steve wrapped his hands around the neck of a broad shouldered tall woman until she died in the grass. Natasha killed four soundlessly with the silencer on her gun, and Steve watched them drop like flies into the dirt. Natasha set her watch for twenty minutes, and they approached the entrance.

There was a snake nailed to the door.

“Well, if that’s not the most ominous thing I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is,” Natasha deadpanned and pushed the door open.

Thor’s building was basically just small squares built on top of one another, and since the bottom floor didn’t have any separate rooms, the whole thing was open for them to see. Same thing as the reception at the main facility. Desk, computer, chairs. Some alien looking crest hanging above the desk and a book written in a foreign language were the only things that really separated it. They had tried to pry open the elevator doors, but after some Asgardians had gotten into some roughhousing on the long trip down from the top floor and almost broke the whole thing, Tony had built it stronger, and Steve couldn’t do more than put a small dent in the metal.

“Stairs it is,” Natasha said.

Thor’s stairs were easier to locate, the only door on the whole bottom floor. They were made from white marble, not metal, and there was a dead cat on the first landing.

“Shit,” Natasha said, suddenly tucking her forehead into Steve’s shoulder in the first display of emotion she’d had all night. “I love cats,” she mumbled into Thor’s jacket, and he briefly rubbed her back until she pulled away.

The little thing was black with white paws. Steve was a dog person, but found himself pretty damn distressed over the thing too. He picked it up and moved it to one of the sofas downstairs, just so it wasn’t laying on the floor like that, and returned to Natasha, who suddenly looked very tired. She hadn’t slept all night, he remembered, and debated telling her to take a rest and he’d go on himself, but she would never go for that. And maybe he didn’t want to go it alone either.

They made their way to the first floor, a drawing room where Thor met with investors for Asgardia and other diplomats interested in the new country he was building. It was stuffy and Thor hated every inch of it, but more importantly, it was also empty. The electric fireplace wasn’t working either. Natasha rummaged through the place and came up with an iron poker and a circular stone cheese board, both of which she foisted on Steve, and a bust of Caesar, which she determinedly clutched in her little hands, ready to clobber at a moment’s notice. Both of them had guns but limited ammo, and Natasha had given him a brief lecture on saving it. Beyond the drawing room was a bathroom, empty, and a little kitchen, also empty. A small hallway led to a balcony. Empty.

They went up another floor.

A gym. Natasha traded out her bust for a dumbbell, fuming that she couldn’t reasonably carry both of them, and when they turned to go back to the stairs the door burst open.

Steve raised his poker and makeshift shield up, ready for the Red Room dead to come again, and was instead faced with a young man, _young_ like Spider-Man was young, with black hair and a lanky frame. He was dressed in some kind of leather armor, not unlike Thor’s Asgardian getup, and was heaving for breath, looking wildly about as he stumbled into the room and closed the door behind him.

“Who are you?” Steve asked without thinking.

The man’s brow furrowed, still breathing hard. “Who are _you?_ ” he replied and said nothing else, as a javelin pierced the door from behind him and went straight though his chest. Both he and Natasha made a noise and lunged forward, but he fell before either of them could catch him. Steve could tell even before Natasha rolled him onto his back that it was over, but she still held his hand and told him it was going to be okay as he died, still that final look of confusion on his face.

She folded his hands over his chest. He looked like a dead soldier, which is probably what he was. “Do you know him?” Nat asked, her voice low.

“Not mine,” Steve replied hoarsely. He had thought on first, hysterical glance that it was a younger Bucky, but this man looked distinctly Asgardian. If whoever was doing this was trying to imitate Bucky, Steve thought he was doing a poor job.

“Must be Thor’s.” Natasha rose, picked up her dumbbell, and moved to the stairs.

Steve hesitated. Leaving a man behind for the second time tonight didn’t sit well with him at all. He swallowed and followed her.

The next floor was a series of empty suites made for visitors. Sparse, bare, and easily defendable, which is why they sat there until Natasha’s next cycle, where the men and women came out of the walls this time, flesh forming from paint, bones and sinew from plaster. They picked them off one by one as they tried to get through the doorways. Steve was beginning to recognize them, the specific way their faces contorted when they died.

On the next floor were more empty suites, and when they went back to the stairs there was a woman waiting for them at the next landing. She was chalky, sweaty, and pale, black hair tumbling in an ocean to the bottom of her spine, and heavily pregnant. “Ma’am, I think you need to sit down,” Steve said, immediately placing down his board and poker even at Natasha’s hissed warning, and helped her, moaning all the while, to sit on the steps.

She wasn’t real, of course. Steve knew that. She was a false body like the Red Room inhabitants, like the Asgardian boy, but she felt warm and real under his hands, shaking with strain. “There’s something wrong,” she whispered, leaning heavily on his arm, one hand fluttering over her stomach. She was wearing white, and the bottom of her dress was stained red.

Steve knew how this was going to end and still held onto her as her cries rose and eventually fell silent. There was blood dripping down the stairs. Natasha had stared at the woman as her body heaved but left the room at some point, possibly to have a mental breakdown in one of the suites, and Steve was left holding her body, still supporting her as she leaned on his shoulder. He picked her up after a moment and gently rested her on the landing, keeping her head propped up to prevent it from lolling. He went and got Natasha from one of the hotel suites, where she had her head down, furiously clutching the edges of the bathroom sink with one hand, the other clasped over her stomach, tried to calm her slightly, and they went back to the stairs. The woman’s body was gone.

The blood was still pooling on the stairs, the only signal that Steve hadn’t lost his mind, and he still had smears of it on his hands. He tried wiping it off on one of the walls, but it just smudged further.

“We should keep moving,” said Natasha tonelessly.

Steve picked back up his poker and board, which as silly as they looked felt much better than guns, and they did. “How many floors are there?” he whispered as they climbed up to the second floor. When he looked up, the white marble seemed to go on forever, stretching towards the sky.

Natasha shrugged. “I never really got the full tour. Something like twenty, probably. If the spell on this place fails, the rooms begin to take up physical space, which is a risk to the airspace above. So it can’t be too high.”

The next floor was more suites, larger ones this time and more luxurious, with claw footed bathtubs and balconies with gold-plated railings. While Natasha stormed around the floor and made note of all the exits, Steve cleaned the blood out from under his fingernails.

The next floor was one big kitchen, more industrial than cozy, obviously made for a team of chefs preparing meals rather than one person whipping up a snack. Natasha yet again traded in her weapon, putting down the dumbbell and making her way to the knife block and pulling out several that she added to the various straps on her pants. Steve meandered around, looking for a sturdier, equally shield-like object before sticking with the cheese board.

“There’s a dumbwaiter here. You think you could get in there and bypass all this nonsense to the top?” Steve asked, opening up the little door at the back of the kitchen.

“You’d have to kill me before I ever got in there. And you’re overestimating how tiny I am,” Natasha replied, although she did trot over and lower the box, sticking the upper half of her torso in the shaft and looking up.

“Anything weird?”

She pulled herself back out, shaking her head. “Might make for a good exit route in a pinch. Wouldn’t count on it though. I might be able to cram myself in there, but you’d never fit.”

They both turned around, back to the stairwell, and there was a man bent over the baking bowls in the corner of the room. His back was to them and he was mixing something in one of the black ceramic bowls lightly with one finger, reading out of a tome to the side, humming all the while.

Natasha drew her gun and Steve gently pushed it back down, shaking his head. She glared at him and lowered it but didn’t put it away. “Excuse me?” Steve called out.

The man stopped humming abruptly and turned. He looked a little like Thor, with pale skin and blue eyes, but his frame was much smaller and the genial face didn’t seem to fit him well, like a bad makeup job done or a realistic mask, but a mask nonetheless. In his other hand, the other one still mixing, was a little vial of something, already uncorked. Steve swallowed. “You want to give that to me?” he asked, holding out one hand and nodding to the vial with the other.

The man frowned. “Why? I’m almost done. Look, I just mix in this last ingredient and—”

Steve lunged for the vial at the moment the man poured it into the bowl, and only instinct saved him by throwing up the cheese board when the whole thing blew up.

He picked himself up off the floor, coughing and tossing the overheated cheese board to the side, and crawled to Natasha’s side where she had been blown a few feet back, dazed but not unconscious. “What was that?” she wheezed, rolling onto her side and rubbing the side of her ribs.

“I don’t know,” Steve replied, helping her to her feet. Now that she was both sooty and bloody, it was becoming a little hard to see her face underneath; the only thing immediately recognizable were the emerald chips of her eyes. “But they’re all dying. I knew he was going to die.” He purposefully didn’t look in the direction of the explosion as he and Natasha stumbled back towards the door, unwilling to see what remained of the man’s body.

That’s what was happening to Thor. Was this Thor’s past? Various people dying in gruesome ways, slain and betrayed by their own bodies, by accidents? Thor was, well, he was incredibly old, and Steve had no doubt he had lost a lot of loved ones over the years to battles and sickness. Were these all people he knew, and this his magical trap, to see them die again?

“Thor just lost most of his whole civilization to his sister. Maybe this is a reflection of that,” Natasha said, limping out into the corridor. Steve watched her go with worry. They had maybe ten minutes before her next cycle, and aside from the fact that she was probably beyond exhausted and privately emotionally overworked, she was hurt as well. Before he could offer her a hand or some assistance she would invariably shoot down, she was leaning over the edge of the staircase, looking back down towards the ground floor. “Come look at this.”

Steve wet a towel before making his way over there. He followed her gaze. Several landings down, the dead cat was back on the stairwell.

“It’s cycles, too. We need to get out of here before that guy blows himself up again,” Natasha said, and they went back down a floor instead to the luxury suites to catch their breath. Natasha checked and reloaded her guns, which might have stalled in the explosion, and let Steve wipe some of the blood and char from her face and shoulders. “So, what do we know?”

Steve sighed and went to rummage for bandages underneath the sinks. “Whatever it is, it works in cycles. Things happen, and then they happen again and again. At least for you and Thor, although Tony’s loop might just be him in that chair over and over, or we’re missing some of the initial action. We don’t know if there’s a way to slow it down or stop it. Some of those deaths seem… inevitable,” he said, pulling out some peroxide and thinking of the pregnant woman. “My working theory is that it has something to do with the past coming back in realistic ways. As to where it came from, you’ve got me there.”

Natasha smiled at him crookedly from where she was perched on the edge of the bathtub. “I think I’ve got the answer to that one. Thor said last night he was working with some artifact a guard had smuggled out of Odin’s vault. I’d bet anything that had to be locked in a vault away from people could do,” she waved, “something like this.”

That was why Natasha tore apart every room they went to. _Always with an agenda,_ Steve thought, but fondly. His first priority was finding Thor, hopefully hiding out with Wanda and Vision, and make sure they were safe. Tony didn’t seem to be in any danger of death unless something different happened to him, but the waves of people coming after Natasha could definitely kill her. The few people they met in Thor’s facility didn’t seem particularly murderous, but… Steve looked up. They still had plenty of floors to go.

They took the next cycle in the luxury suites. Steve thoughtlessly emptied a clip into the man with the goatee and cap when he lumbered a bit too close to Natasha, and she chastised him in chattering Russian when everyone was dead for wasting ammunition. Steve ruefully passed over the two little guns to Natasha, who put them in her endless pockets. He just wasn’t good at guns.

“I’ll find you a new cheese board,” Natasha said, patting his shoulder, a clump of blonde hair from one of the Red Room agents still stuck beneath her thumbnail.

They moved on.

  


“Does it feel like it’s getting… darker?” Steve panted five floors later. “I feel like it’s getting darker.”

The stairs seemed endless, the rooms too similar and repetitive, like they were making their way up never-ending Penrose steps rather than making any real progress. Two more Asgardians had appeared: a young man gored on the tusks of a boar that had vanished as quickly as it had arrived, the bow and arrow still dangling loosely from his hands as he passed, and a beautiful woman who had been eating a lavish feast set out for her at a dining table until she took a sip of wine from her goblet and was poisoned.

Now they were resting after another one of Natasha’s cycles, where the dead had come more viciously than ever and resulted in another clip being emptied and Steve losing his poker to stabbing a man that had toppled over the balcony moments later. The granola bars tasted like heaven. They finished the water bottle between them and filled it from the ornamental spring that sat in the middle of the auditorium they were in. Steve hoped Tony cleaned that water before sending it up here. There was still no sign of Thor. Figures the guy might go for the rooftop to more easily summon lightning if he had been fighting something, and Steve had been about to make a comment about how searching each floor would take them all night when he realized that perhaps dawn should’ve come and gone by now.

“It is getting darker. And there are less times between the Red Room cycles. We’re down to seventeen minutes.” Natasha didn’t sound too bothered.

“That’s a bad thing, right?”

She shrugged. “I think it means we’re getting closer to whatever is causing this. Like a defense mechanism to keep us out, like parasites or sickness.”

Steve didn’t like the implication that the closer they got to this thing, the quicker the dead would come. It was getting numbingly exhausting. He knew their specific fighting styles by now and exactly what each of them looked liked when he killed them.

“You think it’ll stay dark until we figure this thing out?”

“It’s been dark since the power went out.”

“No, the sun came up yesterday. I went for a run and the sun was definitely where it was supposed to be.”

“You must’ve been outside the radius of its effects. That’s good, then. At least we know it’s a small area affected.”

Steve didn’t think he’d describe any part of this situation as “good,” but Natasha had an odd way of looking at things sometimes. _Where else am I going to get a view like this?_ she had said, ready to die on the edges of the floating city of Sokovia.

“You ready?” Natasha said, and pulled him to his feet before waiting for an answer.

The next floor was a spa. It seemed the further up they went the more specialized the floor, with what Steve knew were Thor’s personal rooms on the top, the closest to the skies. There were lounge beds, showers, towels, a cabinet of skincare items that made Natasha’s eyes gleam, and a sauna tucked away in the back, where someone was moaning.

“You go. I’ll watch the door,” Natasha said, nodding to the frosted sliding glass door where something blurry was moving beyond.

Steve nodded. She had held the poisoned woman while she coughed up blood and held back her hair. He would take this one.

The door opened soundlessly, releasing a plume of hot air in Steve’s face. It wasn’t steaming like a sauna should be, not with the power still being out, but it was stuffy and unpleasant all the same. He pulled the door open further, trying to let his eyes adjust to the abject darkness of the little room, where there wasn’t even the faint light from the stars through a window.

The person inside shifted further into the corner.

It would be really easy to walk away. Steve knew that whoever they were, their time was short and there was little he could do to change that, but it felt wrong to abandon them to die alone all the same, even if they would come back and die all over again once they moved on.

“Hello? I’m Steve, Steve Rogers. I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, sitting down at the entrance to the sauna to better get on their level.

The eyes that gleamed out from the darkness were red as blood and chilled Steve to the bone. Not Asgardian. Not Asgardian at all. He tumbled backwards through the open doorway and opened his mouth to call for Natasha, but the thing scooted a little further out and Steve suddenly saw it clearly.

A boy. A little boy with red eyes and two nubs sticking out of his pale blue forehead, his eyes watering with tears.

 _A kid,_ Steve thought in amazement, then with horror, _no, not a kid. Please not a kid._

He slowly moved back into the sauna, reaching one hand out to the alien boy and making nonsense comforting noises. He put his latest weapon, a broken chair leg, outside to the side and scooted to sit next to the little boy. His skin was tacky and sweaty, and his whole body was shaking even as he tried to curl himself into a tighter ball.

“It’s really hot. The air is burning when I breathe,” the boy said.

“I know,” Steve replied.

“Do you?”

“When I was your age, I was really sick all the time. Whenever I would breathe, my lungs would hurt, and sometimes I wouldn’t be able to breathe at all.”

The boy nodded. “Yes, that’s what it’s like.” He curled himself further under Steve’s arm. Steve could hear it, the rasp of air in and out of his body. It sounded horrible, wet and rusty, the way he had sounded when he caught pneumonia and almost died when he was ten. It was even more horrible when it stopped.

He took a minute that time, just to compose himself quietly in the small dark of the sauna, and went out to find Natasha.

She wasn’t rummaging through the cabinets like Steve had expected, and wasn’t in the bathroom either. “Natasha?” he called out softly into the gloom, and listened for a response.

The response came by way of a muffled noise outside, a light scuffle that had Steve charging out before he could even think twice about it.

A blonde woman had her legs wrapped around Natasha from behind, one arm wrapped around her throat and the other hand clapped over her mouth. Natasha’s eyes were wild under the mess of blood and red hair that coated her face even as she scrabbled with one hand to loosen the arm around her throat, the other pinned by the blonde’s legs to her side.

With Natasha right in front of her like that, Steve knew he couldn’t go in swinging, so he looked around wildly for a weapon, anything, but all the things in the sauna were tiny and useless, cucumber slices and face creams. The biggest thing in the room was a family sized bottle of lotion. “Let her go,” Steve said, holding out his hands in front of them.

Like the other Red Room inhabitants, the woman’s eyes were dead and lifeless. No comprehension rang in them. She was wearing Natasha’s suit, all long leather lines and straps that held various guns and knives, and the Black Widow insignia sat center on her belt.

There was so much Steve didn’t know about Natasha, really.

He charged anyway, sending the two of them tumbling backwards, the blonde’s back hitting the railing of the stairs _hard_ and the arm around Natasha’s throat loosening in response. Immediately she gulped in a huge breath as Steve backed up, still unsure how to handle this without hurting Natasha too, and locked eyes with him.

“Keep going,” she said.

Steve lunged for her as Natasha planted her feet and sprang backwards. The two of them hit the railing again and toppled backwards, over the edge and into the darkness.

Steve threw himself to the railing, almost throwing his body over too, casting out a hand into the blackness, praying to feel Natasha’s tiny hand clutch it, but nothing happened, just the cool air of the dark brushing against his palm.

The only consolation is that he didn’t hear them land— two women hitting the floor at top speed, surely that would’ve made a noise. A terrible one. Surely. Natasha had— had probably just caught a railing a few landings down, or caught herself in the wall with a knife or something equally amazing. Anything that made her not dead.

_Keep going._

He didn’t know how long he sat there, listening for her in the dark, not wanting to go follow her but not wanting to leave her either. It wasn’t until he heard the little moaning again from the spa, the raspy, rattling breathing he could hear from feet away that he mechanically ripped one of the cabinet doors off its hinges and made his way further up the stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> last chapter up soon. you can find me elsewhere on [tumblr](https://valkyrisms.tumblr.com/).


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sooo I didn't get the last chapter up in time for halloween, but one day late isn't too bad. tw for this chapter: **depictions of suicide**.

  


The library was small and sad.

The books that had survived Asgard’s burning weren’t many, and a large lot of them were books that the refugees had taken from their homes: entertainment, cookbooks, sometimes a collection of news scrolls collected over the years. The scholars of the palace had done a good job of smuggling out important histories and texts during Hela’s initial invasion, and some of them had gone back for more from the royal library itself. Some of the magicians had sequestered away entire bookshelves of texts into pocket dimensions. Thor’s library was filled wall-to-wall with saved books, maps, and histories, some of them still waiting to be sorted and with no formal system as to how to take them out. Many sat in stacks on the floor.

But compared to the royal libraries of Asgard, Thor described the little floor as _depressing._

Steve crept through the shelves, calling out into the gloom. This seemed like the kind of place Vision might find reassuring if he was trying to hide from something, wrapped up in all this information, and he could see Wanda trailing her fingers down the spines of the books. He turned every corner expecting to find the couple curled in a corner, sleeping in a pile on top of each other, like they did on the sofa of the common room, but everything came up empty. Maybe he should’ve checked Vision’s largely abandoned facility before coming to Thor’s.

Turning down another aisle of books labeled haphazardly _BOR—ODIN,_ he felt his way down, eyes trying to adjust to the dark that seemed to get worse the further into the stacks he went.

A soft gagging noise sounded from a few aisles over. His heart sank even as he moved quicker down the stacks, trying to find the source.

 _Another kid._ Maybe about ten, dressed in the familiar Asgardian clothing he had gotten used to and with a golden circlet on his head. He was hunched over something in his hands, eating. Steve took a step back. The kid looked up from his kneeling position, eyes brimming with tears even as his mouth was an ugly smear of red from the dead bird he was feasting on, and promptly choked on a piece of the bird.

There was only one more aisle of books next to him, and Steve glanced down it before taking a few more steps away from the kid and taking off back to the entrance. There was only so much he could handle in one night, and these encounters were rapidly turning from depressing to nightmarish, especially in the deep gloom of the tall shelves. He could hear the kid eating and choking as he made his way back through the scattered stacks on the floor back to the entrance. For once, he didn’t hear anything signaling death, just the gentle fading out of chewing.

There was a body waiting for him by the door. Steve could only make out the two legs, plated with some kind of scaly armor and wearing boots, as the upper half of the body was mangled too badly to make anything out, both crushed and punctured through. _Chewed,_ his mind helpfully supplied, and he cast the thought away. It was probably a man, pale skin and dark hair, but that was about it. He was long dead. There was no body to hold as it took its final breaths.

He sat by the stairs for another few minutes, waiting to hear anything, Natasha’s almost silent footfalls coming up the stairs, distant fighting or the sound of gunfire. Even the familiar sounds of the Red Room dead returning, but the dark stayed quiet, and Steve sighed and moved onto the next floor.

It was the magician’s laboratories. Many of the engineers had taken to flocking to Tony’s personal labs or the labs at the old Avengers Tower, where they could spread out and blow as much up as they wanted to without the danger of hurting anyone else, but the magicians of the court just wanted a smaller room with plenty of places for reading, writing, and floor space to draw symbols on. There was a state-of-the-art telescope perched to the side, pointing out towards the tarmac and jets. The room was built with windows and not walls after several magicians began to bicker about the movement of the stars, how to draw power from the sun, and the importance of connecting with nature, so Tony had thrown up his hands and put in the bulletproof glass instead.

The place was relatively open and it only took Steve a few minutes to check all the crannies and wardrobes for anyone. There were several potions and tinctures all on shelves along one wall, but they weren’t labeled whatsoever, and Steve didn’t want to accidentally set his lungs on fire trying to find a healing potion. There was, however, a great line of spears and staffs along the other wall. He had practiced batons well enough with Natasha and chose a shorter metal staff that thankfully came with a strap. He slung it over his shoulder and picked up what he thought might’ve been a large scrying dish to carry as a shield instead. No convenient straps, but it was approximately the same size as the Captain America shield he had given away and for the first time during the night, he felt pretty secure.

He turned to head back up the stairs when something registered in his peripheral vision.

He glanced out the window, unsure what had actually caught his attention, scanning the horizon for anything that had changed. It was still dark. The stars were gone. The moon provided the only light for the landscape, and it was only half full, so he had to squint to see much of anything at all.

Then—there. A little burst of red light on the tarmac. So small and slight he would have never noticed it without the high ground. He dragged the telescope over to the window and fumbled with some of the lenses and knobs for a minute before giving up and sticking his eye through the hole.

It was Wanda. Wanda and Vision—

Or Vision’s body, an unfeeling husk of gray nanotech splayed out on the asphalt, as Wanda knelt over him and wept. And then as Steve watched in the telescope’s high tech glory, faded away into bits of ashes. Vision’s arm twitched like he was reaching for her pieces.

And then it reversed. He got to watch as Wanda reassembled and Vision returned to his red and gold plating, and then Wanda kept crying as she burned the Infinity Stone out of his head until she fell apart. And again—

Steve drew back from the telescope.

Just Thor now. Thor and whatever artifact he had picked up and unleashed.

He pushed the telescope away from him and turned to go back to the stairs. He was so far up now, surely only a few more floors to go.

There was another body laying in the center of the room, smack in the middle of one of the magic circles on the floor. And Steve knew this body.

He was younger— younger than when Steve had known him. _Known_ was a strong word. When Steve had fought him, maybe. His hair wasn’t so long, only curling past his ears, and his face still had a bit of boyish youth to it. There wasn’t a big age difference, he didn’t look youngerage-wise, but more open and innocent, even in death. Perhaps if the hair was a little longer and he took that face and twisted it into something feral and mean, put bags under his eyes and a sneer on his mouth, the body would look more like the Loki he knew.

The way he was broken on the floor didn’t look like the Loki he knew either. It looked like he had maybe fallen from a great height, landing face up to stare at the ceiling. There was a pool of blood forming behind his head.

Steve knelt down next to him, hands fluttering above his body, unsure of what to do. This wasn’t just a body. This was Loki’s body. Regardless of whatever he had done to the Earth, Thor had still loved him. But this wasn’t the way Loki had died either— at least not in the way Thor described it. Thanos had choked Loki until his neck snapped.

Either way, Steve pulled one of the robes from the wardrobe and laid it gently over his body. Loki was tall and the tips of his fingers still peeked out from beneath the fabric from where his hands were splayed up by his head.

If this is what Thor had been going through, wherever he was, Steve thought he wasn’t going to be in the mood for any kind of help.

He moved away from the body, apologizing silently, as he crept back to the landing of the stairs and made his way up.

“Leaving without me?” a voice sounded from the landing beneath him.

Steve threw himself to the railing and looked down where, barely visible in the swallowing darkness, Natasha stood, wavering on her feet but smiling warmly up at him. “Natasha,” he choked out and ran down the stairs, hitting his hip and almost falling on his face in a hurry, and helped her up the few remaining steps to lay down on the floor. “Are you okay? Are you hurt? Where—”

She stopped him with a wave, although he could read pain in every line of her body. She was cradling her arm close to her body, although it didn’t look immediately broken. She had cleaned up a little, so her whole face wasn’t covered in blood, and she was missing several of the guns and knives. Steve had to grip the railing to physically restrain himself from scooping her up and hugging her. “I’m fine. That woman— she was trained like I was. I hadn’t expected to see her here. I’m still not convinced she’s really dead,” she said with a little laughing wheeze.

“Don’t worry about that now. We need to go back to the luxury suites— there were first aid kits there, we could—”

She stopped him again with a ferocious shake of her head. “No. We’re almost there. I can feel it.” Steve opened his mouth to argue with her but a gleam in her eye stopped him. “I can feel it,” she repeated, and stood.

He still helped her into the magicians’ lab, placing her down in a chair and getting a better look at her arm. There was no visible damage to it, just the way her lips pulled up in a snarl whenever she moved it, like she was angry at herself for being injured. “We should wrap this,” Steve said, and she wordlessly held out her arm. He checked for swelling and discoloration, but there was nothing. Still, bandages went around her entire forearm and she pulled away the second it was done.

“What’s that?” she asked with a jerk of her head towards Loki’s covered body.

“It’s—” and he paused. “Another one of the dead people. Looks like he fell and cracked his skull.”

He didn’t know why he just didn’t say it, that it was Loki, not just some random Asgardian, but something held him back. Natasha had already been through a lot, for much longer than he had and now with the added bonus of the blonde woman coming after her, and she didn’t need Loki’s body staring at her in the face. Even still, as she rose from the chair and made towards the exit, he saw her eyes trail over those fingertips peeking out from the sheet, narrowed and calculating. There was a pause in her step, but they moved on, leaving Loki there, his blood staining the robe as they went.

  


They made their way up the next few floors without incident. The Valkyrie’s floors were up here, messy and lived-in, and he and Natasha cracked open two of the beers that they found in her little fridge. He’d buy her some more. Steve had been passively keeping track of the time, holding his scrying dish and staff and preparing for the Red Room handlers to pour out of the walls, but they didn’t come. And Natasha didn’t mention it. Maybe after killing or defeating the blonde woman, she had broken the cycle.

Steve didn’t want to ask. Natasha had been oddly silent since returning, grim and focused on the mission at hand in a way she hadn’t been before. And she wasn’t looking through each nook and cranny in the rooms they went through for whatever Asgardian artifact may have caused this, but skimming through the landscape quickly before scurrying up the next stairs. Steve could get that, he supposed. He hadn’t been thinking too hard about the artifact Thor had been tinkering with and more about Thor himself, his eyes black and trapped like Tony, back in the facility, back in Afghanistan.

The sky got darker and darker as they climbed, and Steve finally picked up on whatever Natasha had been feeling earlier. As they went up the hair on his neck began to rise and he found himself checking over his shoulder, behind the weight rack in Thor’s training room, behind doors, every one of his instincts telling him that there was something _wrong_ with the atmosphere.

The stairs went up one final time, and Steve emerged first on the top landing, Natasha right behind him.

The top of the stairs led to a little hallway, and Steve knew at the end was a door that led to Thor’s personal quarters, where hopefully he was holed up, safe and sound. Right now, with the power off, the second half of the hallway was cloaked in shadows, the dim starry light from outside not reaching that far in, and from the shadows a man was stumbling out.

Steve raised his dish. “Excuse me?” he called out. “Are you injured?”

The man looked up. Steve wasn’t shocked to see Loki’s face, but it made his heart sink. From behind him, he felt every line in Natasha’s body lock up and held out his arm before she could push past him and unload a clip between his eyes.

Loki was already dead anyway, by the looks of it. His face was grayer than it should have been and he sagged against the wall with every step. It wasn’t the Loki Steve knew, but also not the one dead several floors below. This Loki’s face wasn’t twisted up in anything but pain, and his hair wasn’t so slicked but curlier, falling to his shoulders. A huge blade jutted out from the center of his chest, and the amount of blood that smeared both the floor, his body, and the wall he was dragging up against let Steve knew this was not something Loki could be coming back from.

“He was beneath that robe, too, wasn’t he?” Natasha said lowly. Steve nodded and set down his dish and staff, taking a few steps forward to steady Loki. “What are you doing?” Natasha hissed from behind him. “Just kill him and move on.”

Steve had seen the footage between Loki and Natasha, back during the original Chitauri invasion, and even though there was probably no love lost for Loki from Natasha, even that struck him as a bit bloodthirsty.

“I’m not going to kill him,” he replied indignantly as he maneuvered Loki to the floor. He didn’t react any any way, no speech and a vacant look in his eyes. The blade that protruded from his back, where he had been struck, prevented him from laying down so Steve just propped him up against the wall, took a look at the wound to see if it was something he could at least grant a temporary reprieve from, and finally just left it alone, sitting next to Loki as he wheezed.

Natasha began again, furiously, “Just kill—”

“I’m not going to kill him. He’s Thor’s brother, and Thor loved him. Plus, he’s—” He paused to grab at Loki’s wrist when he suddenly reached up to try and tug the blade from his chest. “He’s a person,” he said finally, putting Loki’s hand in his lap.

When Loki died, his body sagged to rest against Steve’s side.

If Natasha hadn’t been there, Steve might have just sat there for a moment. The misery of the entire situation had caught up to him rather abruptly when seeing the young dead Loki in the laboratory, and seeing _another_ one, one of Loki’s many deaths that Thor had mumbled drunkenly about, had him almost heaving with sadness. He reached over and put Loki’s other hand in his lap, so he looked almost as if he was sitting peacefully, except for the chest wound, except for his dead, glazed eyes.

When he looked up, Natasha was looking at him strangely. He just sighed and got up, facing down the dark corridor to Thor’s room.

At the very end of the tunnel, there was a faint blue light.

“Come on,” Steve said. “Almost there.”

Natasha was still looking at him, then at Loki’s corpse. He gently tugged her along.

There had been hope in his heart when he saw the light that it was the legendary Asgardian artifact, the thing that had gotten them in this situation to begin with. It was hopefully there, within reach, and something easily smashable, like a glowing vase or something Steve could punch.

It wasn’t, of course.

Loki’s pale, haunted face shook out starkly from where the Tesseract in his hands lit him up. The door to Thor’s room, a ludicrous red color, was illuminated just behind him. He was scruffy and dirty and looking not at Steve or Natasha but some fixed point above both of their heads, behind them. Steve resisted the urge to look back. The cube cradled in his hands, what Steve knew now to be one of the damned Infinity Stones, shook a little with Loki’s trembling hands as he reached up, above their heads, and handed the thing off to whatever he was staring at. At once, the cube vanished, its light going with it, leaving the three of them in the dark.

When Steve managed to fumble with the lantern from the laboratory and finally got it lit up, he was face-to-face with Loki’s torso as he hung above the ground.

There was no rope, nothing suggesting that anything was holding him in midair like that, but he was, three or so feet above the ground, his eyes still fixed on that spot in the dark as he scrabbled around his throat, the blood vessels bursting in his eyes.

This was it. The real death.

Steve knew what had happened. The Thor he knew over a decade ago was so different to the one he knew now, who was quieter, wiser, and more apt to blubber out his feelings when drunk. Who knew how it felt to be feet away from Thanos, watching his brother’s neck twist to one side and his body fall to the floor and knowing that was it— no resurrections this time— and crawling over to his body as the world around him exploded.

Steve made himself watch. It took longer than he thought it would, as the rest of the vessels in Loki’s eyes burst, turning the whites an ugly pink, and his body spasmed, the arms clutching at his throat falling and twitching, and finally as his head snapped to one side with a _click_ that resonated through the dark hallway. The body fell at their feet. His eyes were still open, red stained and unseeing.

He turned to Natasha to say something to break the quiet, but she was staring at Loki, her eyes flat and unblinking. He hesitated, bumping her shoulder with his, and saw her visibly swallow. “Nat…?” he asked, the sound somehow quieter than the snap of Loki’s neck, and she turned to him robotically.

“I wasn’t expecting it to look so… bad,” she replied.

Steve took her gently by the wrist and led her to step over Loki’s body, down the hallway to Thor’s red door. He could feel her trembling slightly, the tiny bones in her wrist creaking against one another, but she tugged her hand away before he could offer more uncertain words of comfort. They stopped in front of Thor’s room, which for everything, looked like it had every any other day they visited him.

Steve opened the door, half-expecting the doorknob to burn him or be locked, but it swung open easily.

Bile rose in his throat immediately, both because of the sight and the overwhelming copper stench of blood. Natasha wasn’t so bothered, and stepped inside, over body after body after body, to where Thor was sitting against one wall, staring vacantly at something in his lap the lantern hadn’t illuminated. Regardless of the carnage of the repeated Red Room attacks, the constant deaths they had seen making their way up Thor’s building, Steve hadn’t expected to find _this._

The floor was covered in bodies. The bodies of the fallen, stabbed, and strangled Lokis, as well as the bodies from the floors below, the kid, the pregnant woman, the cat. Seeing them laying there, collapsed on top of one another, the blood pooling so deep and thick Steve felt like he was drowning in it, he could see, _finally,_ what all the bodies were. They were all Loki. Every single body was Thor’s dead brother. Another thought slotted perfectly into the back of Steve’s mind: Loki was a shapeshifter. And an alien, a different kind of one than Thor. The blue kid in the sauna. Everything made perfect, sad, sense.

The body closest to his feet looked like the youngest Loki, except the immense amount of blood was coming from two identical slits in his forearms. Another one was hanging from the ceiling. He stepped over the body and over another one, a younger version of Loki with an indiscernible cause of death, and another, another, to Natasha. She loomed over Thor.

Thor was doing better these days. He had shed some of his depression weight, started coming out into the sun more, and had overall transformed into a bear of a man, one who stood up straight and fought proud and didn’t wear sunglasses indoors. Now, next to Natasha, he looked the tiniest Steve had ever seen him, curled up and pouring over another body he had draped across his lap. It was the Loki from out in the hallway, the last one. His head lolled on his neck, turning a bit too far to the left to stare vacantly at the wall opposite as Thor gently shook him.

“Wake up,” Thor was telling him. “Wake up.” And moving Loki’s face with one hand, turning him back to face Thor, only for it to loll back when he let go.

Thor’s eyes were like Tony’s, black through and through. With the way he was bent over the body, his hair, cropped to a modest length at his shoulders these days, Steve could see something glistening at the top of his spine. Natasha had already seen it too and maneuvered to Thor’s other side, her hands coming to flutter by his neck. It almost looked like a bug. A scorpion or a beetle, shiny but difficult to see the details in the dim light, with its legs dug sunk deep into Thor’s skin. There was a line of tiny gems trailing down the center of it, each one glowing faint yellow.

“Well, that doesn’t look good,” Steve said.

Natasha shot him a withering look and Steve obligingly knelt on Thor’s other side to take a closer look at the thing. It meant that he was only a few inches away from the dead Loki’s head, which Thor had moved to hold closer to his face, and the long hair brushed Steve’s arm. He resisted the spine-crawling desire to move away and instead gave the little golden bug a tug. Thor didn’t seem to react in any way, which was promising, but the thing didn’t budge either. Those legs were in deep. “I’m assuming this is the Asgardian artifact Thor said he’d be working on,” Steve muttered, pulling at the skin around the little legs.

“Yes. He didn’t really know what it was for,” Natasha replied.

“I suppose now we know,” Steve said. There was a beat of silence, punctuated only by Thor’s constant murmurings to his brother’s body, before Steve spoke up again. “You should probably get that thing off of him.”

“Me? You just tried. If anyone’s strong enough to get that thing off, it’s going to be you,” she muttered, fussing with it, rubbing the gems with the pads of her fingers.

“I don’t want you to rip it off. I want you to magic it off,” Steve replied.

Natasha lifted her gaze to meet his across the back of Thor’s neck, eyes green, glittering jewels in the lantern’s light.

“How stupid do you think I am?” Steve asked quietly, coldly. “Do you think I don’t know her?”

Loki moved quickly. It almost seemed like he crawled on the wall for a moment, behind Thor, to lunge at Steve and send them both tumbling backwards. The shift happened quickly, but not instantaneously, so Steve got to watch in mild horror as Natasha’s body compressed and narrowed into Loki’s and see his hair fall forward into Steve’s face, still scarlet. Loki had him by the throat, and Steve could feel his fingers lengthening against his skin. “I’m here to help,” Loki hissed, his eyes still green like hers. “Whatever you’re planning on—”

Steve let his hands fall to his sides. “Wasn’t planning on anything,” he said, his voice barely a wheeze. Loki wasn’t even _trying._ It was a little insulting. “I let you up here, didn’t I?” Loki’s hands loosened slightly. Steve could see the working behind his eyes, gearing up for a surprise attack or for Steve to suddenly flip on him, before he finally backed off. Steve scooted out from under him, rubbing the side of his neck where he could still feel the phantom fingers growing. “This is out of my league. I know you’re our best chance. But you didn’t have to—” Steve gestured up and down at Loki’s body, “—do all that. You could’ve just…”

“Knocked on your door and offered my assistance?” Loki replied, still half bent over. His voice wasn’t quite what Steve recalled it being, not back to normal, still an unsettling amalgamation of his Asgardian accent and Natasha’s raspy tones. “I imagine that would’ve went well.” Then it was gone, his voice just as Steve remembered, and he wondered if he had imagined it.

“It would have,” Steve replied honestly. If Loki had shown up at their door— if he had walked into the Avengers facility and found Loki sitting there on one of Tony’s crisp couches, explaining the problem and that he was there to help, Steve wouldn’t have thought twice. All he would’ve thought was: _Thor will be so happy._ Natasha, sure, might’ve posed a bit of a challenge, but her moral compass was too relaxed to really hold Loki’s previous actions against him. When Loki didn’t answer and his expression didn’t shift, he tilted his head back towards Thor. “You can help him, right?”

That got his attention, Loki’s head finally turning away from Steve to face Thor. The dead Loki’s head had fallen a different way now, bend backwards, facing them, and his eyes had rolled up in his head.

“What is this?” Steve asked quietly. “What is that thing?”

Loki took his dead self’s head and pushed it, so it fell chin-to-chest, more cradled in Thor’s arms. “It’s a weapon. Magical. Psychological. You could attach it to a soldier within enemy lines and flee, and soon after everyone within a short radius would be affected. It draws out your worst fear, and the more your mind gives in the more it affects you.” He paused before adding thoughtfully, “It eats you, after a while.”

Steve thought about Tony, locked in Afghanistan in his lab. He hoped he hadn’t been eaten yet. Then thought about Natasha, matted with blood back at the main facility, the only one out of all of them not to give in, and felt a surge of pride for her. “Natasha. Where is she?” he asked.

“She is alive and well. I have her in a protective bubble on the first floor,” Loki replied, and Steve felt his face crack a smile, his muscles almost aching after spending so long frowning and tense. She was going to be _furious._ “I caught her, also. She should be thankful.”

“She would’ve caught herself,” Steve replied.

“Yes, I imagine so,” Loki sighed, not sounding upset or surprised at all. He still hadn’t looked away from Thor. He heaved another sigh, deeper this time, before moving closer to Thor and his own dead body, hovering his hands above the little bug.

“I’m not going to lie, I’m glad you’re here. We don’t really have anyone that uses magic on the team, except for Stephen, and well, I don’t know if you’ve met the guy, but he’s…”

“Insufferable?”

“Yeah, sure. But what I’m trying to ask is: how are you here? Thor said you died. I’ve seen how you died,” Steve said, thinking back to the Loki outside, his dead face, his eyes, his neck. “Was it a trick?”

Loki shook his head. “No tricks this time. I died, and then I simply awoke, drifting through space, in the body and clothing I had when I died. My magic was able to create a way to send out a distress beacon. I was picked up by a group of Ravagers and bartered my way back to Earth. I still don’t understand how I came to be revived, but…” He made a gesture to his own body. “Here I am.”

Here he was.

Alive and in the flesh, against all odds. Odds that Loki had played and beaten before, but this time even Thor knew it had been different. He had crawled over Loki’s body and prepared to die himself.

Loki bent his head over the artifact latched on Thor’s neck, murmuring words Steve couldn’t understand, an iridescent shimmer weaving between his fingers. Here he was, wearing Natasha’s skin. Natasha, who had also died and returned.

“You know, when Bruce, the Hulk, they’re the same guy now, snapped everyone back, he snapped back Natasha, Vision too. She woke up on Vormir with this real nice green alien lady, who called her friends and they took her back to Earth. Bruce was thinking of her when he snapped, and he was thinking of the other alien too, because this space raccoon had told him all about her.” Loki turned his face to Steve, face impassive, like this had nothing to do with him, but Steve knew better. Bruce had lived with Loki on the ship, went on his own bizarre adventure with him on a bizarre party planet, came home and investigated every possible alien sighting on Earth. He said his next words cautiously. “Maybe he was thinking of you, too.”

Loki didn’t answer for a moment. “What a touching sentiment,” he eventually replied with a facial expression that said he meant it scathingly, but his tone veered a little too deeply into uncomfortable sincerity for it to cut too deep.

“How long have you been on Earth?” Steve asked after another minute. He didn’t want to pull Loki’s attention away from whatever magic he was working on Thor’s neck, but Loki was here, in front of him, and he was going to get answers while he could.

“A little less than a year. I spent some time with the Ravagers before ultimately deciding to return,” came the short reply.

“You should’ve come to see Thor. He’s been… rough. Better. But rough.”

“I wasn’t sure if he would want to see me,” Loki said, then looked like he wanted to bite it back, like he wasn’t sure why he said it in the first place. “I have died perhaps too many times for him to have the patience for it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Steve said bitingly, because it _was._ Ridiculous that Thor, who still sadly moped along the edges of the lake and watched the sunset, waiting for Loki to come back for _years,_ even if he never admitted that’s what he was doing, who left the entire Earth to escape among the stars because this planet didn’t have his brother anymore, wouldn’t want to see him.

Loki’s fingers twitched. The little golden scorpion let its claws loose with a soft _click_ before Loki could answer, although it took him a second to realize it, because he was staring at Steve with big eyes.

The scorpion clattered to the floor with a _ping,_ which broke Loki out of his moment. With another wave of his hand over the tiny artifact, it vanished. Hopefully he had destroyed it, but Steve knew he probably stashed it away in some magic pocket for some later, mischievous use.

“I don’t want to see that thing cropping up again, okay?” Steve said halfheartedly. “If I start getting reports about dimensions full of horrors I’ll know it’s you.”

Loki sniffed. “Even I’m not foolish enough to play with Asgardian artifacts. I’ll leave that to Thor.” Thor himself had keeled over the second the scorpion detached from his neck, bent over the Loki that was still laying in his lap.

Steve didn’t answer, casting his gaze around the room. The bodies on the edges of the room were fading, Lokis with their spines broken, their wrists slashed, knifes lodged in their sternums, all vanishing into the ceiling in trickles of golden particles. Slowly, the stench of blood faded from the air as more and more of them faded, leaving Steve not sitting in a pile of bodies. The Loki in Thor’s lap was the final one to disappear, the gold bits parting around Thor’s bent over form, cascading through Loki’s hair as they spiraled upwards.

Loki’s face looked different in the warm glow. Younger, less sallow. Brighter.

And then they were gone.

  


Steve had Loki release Natasha from her bubble prison and stepped between them before Natasha could slip a knife between his ribs. It was a bit cumbersome with Thor’s massive body over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, but mostly he was just glad to see Natasha alive and, if not well, relatively unhurt. He interrupted her attempted assassination by enveloping her in as best of a hug as he could and felt her unwind in his arms.

“He fixed this,” he murmured into her ear.

He could _feel_ the way she was staring daggers at Loki over his shoulder. He could also feel the glower Loki was giving her in return.

“Don’t kill him. For Thor,” he added, raising one shoulder to jerk Thor’s body, and felt her minutely relax.

They parted. Steve rested Thor’s body on one of the chairs in the bottom floor’s reception area, making sure to keep on eye on those two over his shoulder.

The way back down had been much, much better than going up. The stairs felt like stairs, the rooms like rooms, Thor’s tower no longer a Penrose labyrinth but a home once again. The dead bodies on the landings were gone. Steve had spent a moment standing outside the sauna, feeling the heat return as the power came back on, listening for the tiny gulps of air before finally opening the door. Loki’s tiny, alien form was gone, and something in his chest eased.

“The artifact? Does he have it?” Natasha asked quietly, slinking to his side and leaving Loki to poke around the rooms on the first floor.

Steve nodded. “Magicked it somewhere,” he answered. “He doesn’t seem inclined to use it. Thor’s visions seemed to… spook him.”

She shook her head. “Seeing yourself dead dozens of times would put you off anything, I suppose. I still don’t trust it.”

Steve didn’t ask how long she had the situation figured out. “I do,” he said, surprising even himself. Loki, as Natasha, had been hateful and unnerved to his doubles, jumpy and unsettled. That artifact would stay safely hidden. He turned back to Loki, who was descending the stairs with an aloof expression on his face that was immediately betrayed by the way he made a beeline for Thor’s body and fussed over it.

Watching the two of them together stirred something in Steve he hadn’t felt in a while. A warmth curling somewhere at the base of his sternum. “Hey,” he called out before he could think better of it. Loki turned. Natasha elbowed him. “The artifact,” he stammered. “Do you know how it works? The precise magic of it, I mean?”

Loki shook his head. “I never got the chance to examine many things in Odin’s vault. The artifacts and equipment there have some of the most intricate magics I’ve ever seen. Unweaving and understanding them would take time I never had,” he admitted, turning his palm upwards, the little scorpion appearing there, unmoving.

Tony was going to kill him after this.

“You should stay here,” Steve blurted out. The elbow that drove into his side almost knocked the wind out of him. “I mean, you could study them here. And Thor obviously has no idea what he’s doing with them and I don’t want this to happen again. He’ll be happy to work with you and—“ He gestured upwards. “—You know we have a magical lab here. And a sorceress who could use some training.”

The expression on Loki’s face was nothing short of gaping.

“And we could keep an eye on you,” he added finally for Natasha’s benefit, casting a meaningful glance in her direction. She did not look fooled.

“Captain,” Loki said finally. “Are you offering me a job?”

“Suppose I am,” he replied.

It was a stupid idea, really. But it would prevent this, or something worse, from happening again, keep Loki occupied before he could enact trouble elsewhere and, well. Thor would be happy.

“Yes,” Loki said. “I wouldn’t force Stephen Strange on anyone,” he added snidely.

Steve, a little stunned, just grinned at him. Natasha looked up at him and Steve glanced over at her. The line of her mouth was hard and displeased, but her eyes were warm.

“We should call the magicians back from New Asgard,” she said. “They should be informed about the _new member of the team_.” It was hard to tell if her tone was teasing or scathing, but Steve took it as a win.

She kept her eyes on Loki as she made her way to the receptionist’s desk and logged onto the computer. He was going to have to monitor that situation, but for right now he walked past both of them and opened the door.

From the base of Thor’s tower, he could see the Avengers main facility, the light glinting off the windows. In the distance, he could see Tony’s figure emerging from the front door, looking haggard and bent, missing his shirt. Even at this distance, he could see that his chest was safely closed, his lungs and heart sealed where they were supposed to be, the only memory of his experience his arc reactor, glowing bright. He staggered a few feet from the entrance, keeping one arm braced against the side of the building, before his knees went out.

A figure cloaked in red caught him from behind. Steve watched Wanda drag Tony back inside, Vision trailing behind her. From behind, small snuffling sounds alerted him Thor was waking up, and Loki would be next to him as he opened his eyes; after seeing so many dead brothers, Loki alive, breathing, _here_.

Dawn had indeed come and gone. After so long in Thor’s facility, with the oppressive weight of the artifact’s manufactured darkness, the brightness and warmth were overwhelming. Steve stood there for a moment, letting the heat wash over him.

“You alright?” Natasha called out from the receptionist desk.

“Yeah,” said Steve, stepping to the side to let the light in. “The sun’s out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm over on [tumblr](https://valkyrisms.tumblr.com/) neck-deep in chinese dramas if you want to come chat.

**Author's Note:**

> next chapter should be up in the next week. unbeta'd, so if anything looks wonky or you spot any typos, feel free to let me know.
> 
> meanwhile, hmu on [tumblr](https://valkyrisms.tumblr.com/) if you want to chat.


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